Glycan Receptor Binding of the Influenza A Virus H7N9 Hemagglutinin

The advent of H7N9 in early 2013 is of concern for a number of reasons, including its capability to infect humans, the lack of clarity in the etiology of infection, and because the human population does not have pre-existing immunity to the H7 subtype. Earlier sequence analyses of H7N9 hemagglutinin...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tharakaraman, Kannan, Jayaraman, Akila, Raman, Rahul, Viswanathan, Karthik, Stebbins, Nathan W., Johnson, David Alan, Shriver, Zachary H., Sasisekharan, Ram, Stebbins, Nathan W., Sasisekharan, Viswanathan
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Elsevier B.V. 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/89160
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1288-9965
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9344-0205
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2085-7840
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6528-0125
Description
Summary:The advent of H7N9 in early 2013 is of concern for a number of reasons, including its capability to infect humans, the lack of clarity in the etiology of infection, and because the human population does not have pre-existing immunity to the H7 subtype. Earlier sequence analyses of H7N9 hemagglutinin (HA) point to amino acid changes that predicted human receptor binding and impinge on the antigenic characteristics of the HA. Here, we report that the H7N9 HA shows limited binding to human receptors; however, should a single amino acid mutation occur, this would result in structural changes within the receptor binding site that allow for extensive binding to human receptors present in the upper respiratory tract. Furthermore, a subset of the H7N9 HA sequences demarcating coevolving amino acids appears to be in the antigenic regions of H7, which, in turn, could impact effectiveness of the current WHO-recommended prepandemic H7 vaccines.